Hell and Back Read online

  “Stop,” I whimpered, “please stop.”

  “Your sisters, they would have been happier, they would have been able to enjoy the rest of their childhood. Your mother and father, well, their marriage problems would have been fixed. Your mother wouldn’t resent you every time she looked at you, so she could fix her marriage with your father. The kids at school, well, they wouldn’t have even batted an eye. They wouldn’t come to your funeral. In fact, your funeral then would have only had a few people there, mostly family. Sort of similar to what your actual funeral was like. Do you want to know how many people came to your funeral?”

  “No.” My voice was scarcely more than a whisper.

  “Twenty, total.”

  I swallowed. “Twenty?”

  “Twenty.”

  I pinched my lips together, my hands shaking. Twenty people. Twenty people, out of the hundreds and hundreds I had met in my life, had showed up at my funeral.

  “How do you know all this?” I asked, my voice cracking.

  “You’re sitting here in hell, a place that you weren’t even sure existed until now, and you’re wondering how I know about your funeral?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Do you remember David?” the woman asked.

  “Which one?” It was a common name, I had known several, but I suspected I knew which one she was talking about.

  “You had a crush on him for years. Years!” she laughed. “You tried so hard to get his attention, until you went to different high schools and he started dating some other girl, a girl that was prettier than you, smarter than you, more athletic than you. He never cared about you, you know. He knew about your crush, and he was repulsed by you. He laughed at you behind your back. His friends would tease him about you, and he would in turn make fun of you, the way your teeth were crooked, and later, your braces, the way your skin used to break out. The way you started developing more than the other girls. He thought you were such a joke. He still does. When you died, he was relieved. He’d never have to think of you again.”

  I wanted to cry, but no tears came.

  “And then there was the other David—”

  “Caan-Ez,” said a voice, and I turned to see a dark figure, almost certainly the one who had been watching me earlier. “Molech is looking for you.”

  There was movement outside my cell and a creature rose up, his thin body covered in spikes. It turned to look at me, with the face of a cow. “See you later,” it said in the voice of a woman.

  The figure watched as the demon walked away, then he stepped up to the cell. His bright green eyes met mine.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Parker.”

  Chapter Four

  I climbed to my feet, backing away from the door of the cage. “That was a demon?”

  Parker nodded. “Yes. It’s what they do, it’s how they torture you. They can’t touch you, but they can talk to you, make you miserable. Some of them can shape shift, make you think they’re people you knew in real life.”

  The man’s voice was softer than I’d expected.

  “They can’t touch you, so it’s how they make this place hell for you.”

  I shook my head. “They can’t touch me?”

  Parker leaned against the bars of the cell, crossing his arms. “The thing about round-the-clock torture is eventually, you get used to it. Demons aren’t allowed to touch you unless you’re actually being tortured. Make the torture more...agonizing.”

  “You touched me,” I said, my hands pressing against the stone walls of my cell. “You dragged me in here.”

  He looked down at the ground. “I’m a guard, not a demon.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “For some of us, yeah. I’m human.”

  I wasn’t sure if I believed him. How did I know he wasn’t lying to me, just like that demon before? I crossed my arms, narrowing my eyes. “So if you’re human, why do you get to wander around out there while I’m stuck in a cell in here?”

  “It’s part of my punishment,” he said.

  “Then you must have been a better person than I was in life,” I said.

  “It’s not that,” he said. He pinched his lips together. I was making him uncomfortable, or upset, or both.

  “It’s Meg, right?” he asked me, and I gave him the smallest nod. “My job is to haul people into their cells and down to the torture chambers. I hand-deliver them to the demons who will cause them the greatest pain they will ever experience over and over and over again. I have to sit there with the knowledge that I’m bringing them to that. I have to sit and listen while they scream. I have to drag them back to their cells, bloodied and bruised, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.”

  “They use your empathy against you,” I said, the skepticism still obvious in my voice.

  “I think it’s basic humanity.” He shrugged.

  “I’d rather be out there than in here.”

  “Didn’t you hear anything I just said?”

  “And how do I know I can believe anything you say? You could be a demon, just like them.”

  “But I’m not.”

  I only raised my eyebrows and shrugged.

  He sighed. “My name, when I was alive, was Parker Cole. I grew up in Southside Minneapolis. When I was nineteen, both my parents died and I raised my sister and two brothers on my own.”

  “You sound like a good person,” I said. “Like, a really good person. So why are you here?”

  He bit his lip and looked down at the ground. “I made a deal.”

  “A deal?”

  “With a demon. I was desperate.”

  I tilted my head at him, ready to challenge his story. “What did you ask for? Fame? Fortune?”

  “Fortune may be a bit exaggerated,” he said. “My parents had just passed away and had left us almost nothing. I was trying to raise my brothers and sisters, but it was hard. I was working three jobs, working all the time. They weren’t getting the attention they deserved, and they were so young, they needed it. I was constantly exhausted, and we still struggled to make ends meet. So when I was twenty, I made a deal. A secure, well-paying job, and in seven years, I’d be dragged to hell.”

  “Seven years? You gave yourself seven years, and you were still working?”

  “I was desperate. I wasn’t in the proper position to negotiate.”

  “So you really don’t deserve to be here,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “When did you die?” I asked.

  His death date was only two weeks before mine.

  “Similar date of death, same town,” I said.

  “That’s intentional,” he told me. “It’s part of the way they torture me. They assigned me to this area because I’d have things in common with the people here. That way, when it’s your turn to be tortured, it would hurt me more.”

  “So why get close to anyone then? Why talk to me at all?”

  He paused. “It gets lonely down here. Really lonely. Some people are introverts, and some are extroverts, but everyone craves some level of human interaction, even down here. I tried keeping to myself when I first got here, but I was about to go crazy.”

  “How long have you been here? I thought you only died a few weeks before me, but you’re making it sound like you’ve been here way longer.”

  Parker reached up to rub his temple. “Time—the way we’ve always thought of time—doesn’t really exist here. We don’t have hours or minutes, no clocks, no way of knowing how time passes. Plus, I was pulled straight here by the demons. You had to go through reception.”

  “Reception, that’s what they call it?”

  He shrugged. “It’s what I call it.”

  I allowed myself to step a little bit closer to the cell doors, still out of his reach. “Why don’t you just refuse?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When they make you drag people to torture, why don’t you refuse?”

  “Do you think I didn’t try that?” he asked, shak
ing his head. “They can control me if they want to, send a demon to take over my body. They force me to drag a prisoner to torture while I watch from inside my body. Then they torture me.”

  “What is it like, the torture?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to know.

  He looked down at the ground, shaking his head again, pulling his arms in close. “It’s indescribable. Worse than you could ever imagine. It seems to stretch forever, and the effects last almost as long. It’s brutal.”

  “How often does it happen, that we’re tortured?”

  “It’s random. The prisoners here outnumber the demons, otherwise everyone would be tortured far more often. They drag prisoners whenever they feel like it. Sometimes you can go ages without being pulled in again, and sometimes you haven’t even recovered before it’s your turn once more.”

  “That sounds…” I sighed. “That sounds like hell.”

  He nodded. “To me, that’s not the worst part.”

  “How is torture not the worst part?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” he said. “But for me, the worst part is that I don’t have that connection with people. I have to watch the people I grow to care about suffer. And I miss physical touch.”

  “What do you mean?” I furrowed my brow. “You touched me when you dragged me here.”

  “I can touch people when I bring them to and from their cell, and that’s it. Look.”

  He held his hand out, passing it through the bars of his cell. I hesitated, then reached toward him. Our hands met, but I didn’t feel his touch. I didn’t feel anything at all.

  “What?” I stared at our two hands, where I could see they met.

  “It’s another one of their tricks,” Parker said. “No touch. Everyone needs touch, and they take it away from you. The only time you can feel someone else’s touch is when you’re being dragged or when they’re inflicting pain.”

  I had never particularly cared for touch, but the sorrow across Parker’s face told me he cared greatly.

  I looked down at my hands. “Is that what you miss most? Touch?”

  He shook his head. “It’s close, but I miss my brothers and sister more.”

  I gave him a wry look. “I doubt my family misses me.”

  “Is that what the demon said? I told you not to listen to him.”

  “I would have felt that way even if the demon hadn’t said it. They never liked me much.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.”

  “I think it is.”

  He gazed at me. “You believe that, don’t you?”

  I shrugged. “Now I’ll never know if I was right or not.”

  “Death leaves us without answers,” he sighed. “How did you die?”

  “I don’t know. One minute I was in my car with my boyfriend and best friend. The next, I was in that waiting room.”

  “Instantaneous? Do you think it was a car accident?”

  “Maybe, but I had parked. I suppose that doesn’t mean it wasn’t an accident, though. Plenty of people hit parked cars. If that’s the case, I guess it’s good that my death was instant, rather than me being in agony in my last minutes.”

  “Hold on to that optimism. You’ll need it.”

  “Thanks for the pep talk.”

  He shrugged again.

  I had another thought. “Why do I bleed?”

  “Sorry?”

  “I don’t sweat. So why do I bleed?”

  He frowned. “I don’t really know. You can’t cry either, not tears. I think the blood is a part of their torture. It makes the torture more real, more physical. You can see the results.”

  “But I can’t die? I can’t bleed out?”

  “We can’t die. If we could, all our organs would be ash and our skin would have melted off our bodies.”

  I only nodded. It was what I had assumed, but still disappointing.

  “What about food? Sleep?”

  He shook his head. “You can’t eat. At least, there’s no food here. You don’t need it to live. You can’t sleep, that I know for sure. I’ve tried, to pass the time, but I can never fall asleep. You might be resting, but you’ll always be awake.”

  “Another part of their torture,” I sighed.

  He nodded. “Exactly. Everything here is designed to drive you a little bit crazy.”

  “Even you?”

  “Not me, not really,” he laughed. “You’re probably here to drive me crazy, though.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Me?”

  He shrugged. “I like you. You seem cool. And they’re probably going to use that against me.”

  “Maybe you should go.” My heart pounded as I said the words. I didn’t want him to, I actually enjoyed his company.

  He kicked at the dirt. “Maybe.”

  “Parker!”

  I voice from near the pit shouted his name and he turned around, body a dark silhouette against the orange pit.

  “Abaddon needs you,” the voice said.

  Parker turned back to me, his whole body tense. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Abaddon?”

  “The demon in charge of torture,” he sighed. “It means I’ve got to bring another soul down.”

  “Oh,” I said, disappointment settling in my stomach. “Well, have fun.”

  He offered me a tight smile before I realized I probably hadn’t said the right thing.

  I sat back down in my cell, knees to my chest, looking out. I watched as Parker crossed to several cells down. He was out of my line of vision for several minutes, but when he came back over, he was pulling someone behind him. It was too dark to make out much, but the person he was dragging walked hunched over, like an old man. I swallowed the lump in my throat. The man was pulling, trying to escape, but Parker’s grip was far too strong. The man dragged his feet, and if he wasn’t drowned out by the sounds of everyone else’s screams, I’m sure I would have heard his shrieks of resistance. In a way, I was glad I couldn’t actually hear him. It made it a little bit more bearable to see what Parker was being forced to do.

  He glanced back at me once, when he was across the pit from me, and even from so far away I could see the pain in his eyes. There must have been a staircase on the far side of the pit, because I saw the two of them step down lower and lower until they disappeared down the rim of the pit and into the orange abyss below. I swallowed as they vanished from my view.

  With Parker gone, dragging his newest soul to the terrible torture that awaited, I pulled myself back in the corner of the cell, my head resting back against the stone. I had learned a lot from what Parker had told me, but it wasn’t enough. My only hope would have to be that he would come back so that I could learn even more, learn enough to figure out how to escape this place.

  Because with everything I had learned, the one thing I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, was that I needed to get out of here. The solitary confinement, the lack of physical touch—perhaps I could handle being without that for a while. Sure, in plenty of time it would make me crazy, but for now, it was something I could handle.

  The idea of torture terrified me. I had never handled pain well, and sharp things, like knives and needles, gave me terrible anxiety. I knew that I’d survive it, since I couldn’t die, but knowing the pain could come for me at any time was my worst nightmare. Yet, even with the threat of torture looming over my head, that wasn’t what I was the most worried about.

  It was Mitchell that I couldn’t stop thinking of, and, to some extent, Courtney. We had been through so much together, and they deserved to be happy even though I was gone. And to that end, I had made a terrible mistake.

  The two of them would go to collect the money from the first two heists, but they wouldn’t find it in the little black safe stashed in my closet. I had gotten nervous, terrified that police would find us, and so I had hidden it. One night when the two of them were sleeping, I’d put all the stacks of bills together in a small drawstring bag and wrapped that bag in layers of plastic to keep the moisture out. I
’d sneaked out of the house and toward the far end of our rental property, where there were some trees and a stream. With a shovel in hand, I had dug a hole beside my favorite tree, the tall weeping willow, and buried the cash there. The police would never be able to find it, but I could locate it easily once our final robbery was done and we were ready to make the move across the country.

  I hadn’t told Mitchell and Courtney out of fear that they would dissuade me. They had been more bold about everything involving the robberies, and I was the only one thinking in any way that could be considered rational. They were never supposed to find out that I had hidden the money; I was going to get it before they even noticed it was missing, once I was sure we were in the clear and the police weren’t on to us. Now, though, they would have no idea where I had hidden the cash

  Now, I was dead.

  Chapter Five

  “How long was he down there for?” I asked.

  Parker and I were sitting back to back against the cage, but of course, I couldn’t feel his touch. I just knew he was there.

  “A long time,” Parker said, sighing.

  “He looked old.”

  “He is. Probably in his eighties when he died.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know. He’s one of the ones that won’t talk to me.”

  “I find it hard to believe that someone doesn’t want to talk to you. You seem friendly enough.”

  “He didn’t seem like a very nice person when he was alive, either,” Parker said. “Sort of crotchety. I don’t know.”

  “Well, at least you didn’t have to bring down someone you liked.”

  “It’s hard either way.”

  “You’re more sympathetic than I am,” I said.

  “Am I?”

  “By far. If it was someone I didn’t like, I would feel a little bit good about bringing them to torture.”

  “Not once you’ve experienced it for yourself, you wouldn’t.”

  I shrugged. “There are plenty of people I went to school with that I would be happy to watch suffer.”

  “Did you have a rough childhood?”